The end of the monarchy was also the birth of liberty and of the free Roman Republic. For the rest of Roman history, ‘king’, or rex, was a term of loathing in Roman politics, despite the fact that so many of Rome’s defining institutions were supposed to have their origins in the regal period. There were any number of cases in the centuries that followed when the accusation that he was aiming at kingship brought a swift end to a man’s political career.
